FOUND: Aurorae 1 Million Times Brighter Than Any on Earth

Email This Article

Please separate multiple addresses with commas. We won't share addresses with third parties.

Message

Subscribe me to theAtlas Obscura Newsletter

An artist’s impression of the aurora (Image: Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech)

Eighteen and a half light years away from Earth, there’s an object that we call LSR J1835 + 3259. It’s the type of body astronomers call a brown dwarf, or a failed star—more massive than Jupiter, but not quite big enough to be a star. The strange thing is: it’s throwing off radio waves that we can measure here on Earth.

That surprised scientists, and they started looking for a cause. Now, they’ve concluded in a Nature paper that the signals from the failed star come from aurorae—the sort of celestial display that’s known, on this planet, as the northern or southern lights.

Aurorae are connected to planets’ magnetic fields: they occur when electrons stream through a planet’s atmosphere and run into other molecules. These collisions give off bright, colorful light.

In our solar system, Jupiter’s aurorae are the strongest. But the ones the scientists detected at the brown dwarf are even more extravagant–about 1 million times brighter than aurorae here on Earth.

“If you were to somehow stand on the brown dwarf’s surface and survive—the surface gravity is maybe 100 times more intense than Earth’s, and the temperature is several hundred to several thousand degrees—you’d see a beautiful bright-red aurora,” one of the scientists told Space.com.

Stay in Touch!

No purchase necessary. Winner will be selected at random on 09/01/2018. Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). Offer subject to change without notice. See contest rules for full details.

Add Some Wonder to Your Inbox

Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you.

We'd Like You to Like Us

We value your privacy

Atlas Obscura and our trusted partners use technology such as cookies on our website to personalise ads, support social media features, and analyse our traffic. Please click below to consent to the use of this technology while browsing our site. To learn more or withdraw consent, please visit our privacy policy.